I’ve been reading sociologist Amitai Etzioni’s thoughts on what he calls commutarianism. He describes the Clinton presidency on the liberal blog, The Huffington Post, as defying liberal/conservative labels by being commutarian:
[Clinton] certainly did reveal some liberal proclivities, but his welfare reform was clearly in a conservative mode, and he capped most social programs in order to balance the budget. (He ended up generating a surplus which the Bush administration inherited and squandered). At other times, when looking for common ground, promoting volunteerism (AmeriCorps), and trying to defuse tensions between the races and between the religious right and the liberal secularists, Clinton was much more a communitarian than a liberal.
Communitarianism, a social philosophy centered around the concept of community, is hardly a household word and is very unlikely to become one. However, one should consider it — because Barack Obama is easily the most communitarian presidential candidate of all those we have seen for decades.
He later defines commutarianism as being focused on the importance of community, the common good, and service, contrasting it with divisive strategies such as identity politics.
How does this fit in with the American ideal of individualism? Hasn’t society become increasingly fragmented to the point where there isn’t a shared society or culture? Could you just say that Clinton and Obama are simply being pragmatic in their approach? Isn’t McCain a commutarian, as well?
Politics aside for a moment, I think there’s something to this idea of commutarianism, given sociological research on organizations, well entrenched in the workings of capitalism. In task-oriented settings, you can have “communities of practice” that go beyond functional areas (e.g., marketing, finance, accounting, etc.) and even organizational boundaries (firms collaborating on innovations or dividing up specialized tasks). It begs the question of what are the true drivers of collaboration in politics that go beyond immediate self-interest? Is it trust? Framing activities as uniting common causes? All of the above?
I think it’s hard to be communitarian in certain contexts and one only has to look at office politics to see evidence of this. Nevertheless, I think that as a philosophy that can be embedded in a set of values, commutarianism can foster a shift in priorities. These shifts could be good or bad, so I don’t feel that commutarianism is a panacea. I do feel that these shifts require a critical mass of shared values and the meanings behind them. I don’t think a lot of this is new, but I think what is new is getting the general populace thinking and behaving in these terms and replicating this over time.
Comments 4
Jon Smajda — October 13, 2008
I've never understood communitarianism. To me it's a bit like libertarianism in that it simply replaces the hard substantive questions with vague statements about valuing "communities" or "liberty."
Almost any political ideology allows one to believe they are "focused on the importance of community, the common good, and service." The hard questions are: What is the community and who counts as a member? What is the common good? What kind of service is most valuable? Libertarianism does the same thing with a different set of questions: Which liberties are most important? Which constraints are justified?
So is communitarianism more a rhetorical style or strategy than a coherent political ideology?
jose — October 14, 2008
Jon...I think communitarianism differs from libertarianism in that is advocates using the power of the state to promote social good. When I teach it, I talk about it in opposition to libtertarianism in that it believes in state intervention to maintain social order like conservatives, but it also believe in state intervention to regulate the economy like today's liberals. I think if we had an expanded political discourse, a plurality of Americans would consider themselves communitarian. They are reasonably socially conservative but lean towards state intervention in the economy (of course without paying higher taxes) :-)
Jonathan Pfeiffer — October 15, 2008
Ken, do you know about Yochai Benkler's idea -- that in economics, collaboration is driven by psychological and social needs? He says that people contribute to Wikipedia and give cups of tea to sick friends for the very same reasons. His idea ostensibly transfers to politics, as well.
Jon Smajda — October 15, 2008
@jose: ok, but you've got divisions between "left libertarians" who are more suspicious of corporate power and "right libertarians" (who in this country are generally all people mean when you say "libertarian") who are suspicious of state power but quite trusting of business.
The same for communitarians: there are right communitarians who emphasize things like religion, traditional families and a conservative, white, Christian view of "American Values" and then there are left communitarians for whom communitarianism is about building a multicultural, superordinate American identity across racial & religious lines and using the state to achieve social justice goals.
So I get that libertarianism & communitarianism differ in their acceptance of state action. The problem I have is that politics is all about deciding when state action is acceptable and when it is not, not whether or not state action is always good or always bad. Because most political ideologies are libertarian about some issues and communitarian about others, and because definitions of things like "social good" vary so wildly, having someone tell me they are "communitarian" just doesn't say that much on its own. (Libertarian might say a bit more, though again you have to figure out if they're coming at it from a right or left direction first.)
Your description of communitarianism (with moderate views towards state intervention on both social & economic issues) just sounds like a middle-of-the-road political moderate to me: a cautious commitment to moderate levels of state intervention in social & economic issues while still respecting individual & subgroup autonomy. By that defintion, communitarianism doesn't seem to me to be about "the common good" in opposition to "libertarianism," but is simply a bridging philosophy between statism and anti-statism, between multiculturalism and assimilationism. That sounds pretty sensible, but I'm not sure what makes it "communitarian" then. It just sounds like contemporary moderate American liberalism.